Grandma Cameron
by Chris St Thomas
Summary: Outside cannon and outside my AUs. A tale of Cameron's silver years. "Grandma Cameron, Uncle Danny says you brought his daddy back from the dead. Are you gonna be a Saint when I grow up?"


General John Connor, Commander of the Human Resistance and his crack team of scientists may have constructed me, but it was his younger self who made me. I was constructed as TKO715. My name is Cameron Phillips. I was set into the past as a Machine to be John Connor's protector when he needed one. I returned to the future as a woman to be his companion, friend and partner because that's what I wanted.

He once said to me, "You've always been a person to me, Cameron. Just because you're not fully organic doesn't make you any less human, to me anyway." When John told me that he was physically seventeen (though twenty-three years had elapsed since his birth) and he had known me for almost two years. At that time I was about eight emotionally and had known him just a few weeks. Time travel, it will make your brains leak out your ears if you think about it to hard. Me? It just overheats my processors.

As a teenager he saw the promise in me, the potential to grow beyond my mere programming, to be more than just the sum of flesh and organs and metal and processors. We talked of love and art and music and dance and sports and TV and movies.

When I was far more Machine than woman he defended my honor against a lecherous school teacher and he wanted my first kiss to be something wonderful. He patiently helped me learn how to behave like a young woman and treated me as if I were one all along (except for that day at the gas station in 1997, but we won't say any more about that). When I was more woman than machine and his consort lay brain dead in sick bay, he asked me carry his child to term.

And now that we're both old and gray and the world is young again –

"Grandma, are you gonna be a saint when I'm all grown up?" queried a wee voice, one of the grandchildren. It sounds like Phillip, my youngest grandchild. He must be about seven (7 years, 162 days, 5.41 hours, but who's counting). He's the son of my second child, my daughter Danielle Sarah, named for my hero Daneel Olivaw and John's late mother.

"Why would you ask that honey?" A human trait isn't it, to answer a question with a question.

"Well, Uncle Danny says that you and Grandpa John brought his daddy back from the dead. I thought only Saints and Angels could do stuff like that."

"Sweetheart, your uncle Danny exaggerates, just a tad." John walked up next to me on the porch with his coffee. My power cells are running low now, so I don't think as fast or as clearly as I used to. And I can't run faster a horse or lift a small car anymore. Actually I haven't been able to do that since I traded in my coltan endoskeleton with its servos and pistons for real bones and muscles and tendons.

Oh, what an operation that was! We have the technology. We can build a woman android. We can make her slower, weaker, more human than she was before. Cameron Phillips Connor will be that woman. There was a TV show from before John's time called the _Six Million Dollar Man _that I used to watch at two o'clock in the morning, Right after _Max Headroom_ on the Sci-Fi Classic Channel.

Call me the un-bionic woman. About the only things left of me that aren't organic are my eyes, my processors and my memory storage. How do you transfer a soul? John tried that with Cameron Alpha. She became Kate Brewster 2.0. Worked fine for a while. Eventually it went nuts started killing people: humans, androids, even little kids. Disaster. Derek Reese got to go out and hunt it down and retire it, rather like Harrison Ford in that Ridley Scott movie, what was it called? _Do Androids Dream_? No, that wasn't it. It was his last Mission before John and I sent him back to 2006. I've always wondered if he enjoyed that hunt.

I wanted to have a child. My own child; John's and mine. Not just finish gestating the original Kate's. The doctors and scientists figured that I would have to become more fully organic for that to work. So, we figured a way. Thank heaven for my synthetic skin and nanobots for quick healing.

But I digress. An old woman loses her train of thought now and again. Especially when her brain is microprocessor that was out-moded fifty years ago. It's amazing I still function. "What were you asking about, honey?"

"Tell us about how you and Grandpa John brought Uncle Danny's dad back from the dead."

"Well, honey, I remember that as if it were yesterday." But then all my memories are like that. Perfect crystal clarity, never dulling around the edges, never forgetting part of the story, well unless you count losing the occasional check bit during a system back up. "Gather round your friends and cousins and we'll tell this one more time."


End file.
